Sparks: A catastrophic climate event is upon us. Here is why you’ve heard so little about it | George Monbiot
A machine that calculates profit to the ninth decimal cannot process a variable it was never programmed to see.
Is the man who denies the coming storm more afraid of the storm itself, or of the cost of building a shelter from it?
What practical difference in next quarter's ledger would it make for them to acknowledge this truth?
Even the most extravagant fortune will not purchase a single extra moment when the sea reclaims the land.
Democracy falters not when its people are ignorant, but when a separate aristocracy of wealth is permitted to curate that ignorance.
Princes who mistake the balance sheet for the territory will find their principalities swallowed by a rising sea they refused to chart.
Their public speeches cite market stability, but their private calculations show a clearer motive: the fear of diminished returns.
From my saddle, I observe the high pasture already turning brittle and brown, a change the men in their city clubs call a statistical anomaly.
Hateful things: a screen of polished words erected to hide the gathering clouds.
Their hegemony is most secure when they need not ban the news, only render it uninteresting and unprofitable to report.
It is easier to silence a scientist than to explain to a shareholder why this quarter's dividends are washing out to sea.
The factory owner's ledger shows a favorable balance, an entry that conveniently omits the cost his effluent imposes on every downstream farm.
Bureaucratic socialism and unbridled capital share the same superstition: that nature can be indefinitely partitioned and sold without consequence.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, yet we mortgage the entire farm for a penny's worth of present profit.
In every court from Delhi to Fez, I have seen that a ruler who silences his astronomers will soon be blindsided by the stars.
It is a most elegant solution to refine the art of denial until it becomes more profitable than addressing the problem itself.
The creator, horrified by the scale of his creation, now pretends he cannot hear its thunderous approach.
One observes in the fossil record that the most specialized and inflexible creatures are the first to be expunged by a changing world.
A complete catalogue of tomorrow's profits is rendered useless if it fails to account for the atmospheric variables of today.